David Cotter's ambitious and packed study, James Joyce and
the Perverse Ideal, seeks to explore "sexual perversity" by
looking at Bloom's masochism (1). The book opens with the following
assertion:

The elements of sexual masochism in Joyce are typically either
ignored or disdained: they make us feel uncomfortable. Although
sexuality is recognized to be at the center of Joyce's work,
criticism has addressed this topic from a safe distance, and often
with overtones of voyeurism or condescension. When criticism has
addressed the topic of sexuality in Joyce, it has tended to focus
on the ideological significance of his sexual attitudes, rather
than on the nature of the sexuality that he has presented.

(1)

The author sees Ulysses as "the story of a mild man
who for ten years has chosen to masturbate rather than have
penetrative sex with his wife, whom he finds very sexy," and he
finds it "strange" that there has been "an abiding reluctance to
concede that sexual masochism runs like a core through the center
of Joyce, and is the impetus of his writing" (1). A quick glance at
the endnotes and bibliography confirms that Joycean literature on
the subject of sexuality appears to have been, indeed, consulted.
The author's contention is that "Bloom's masochism is not an
anomaly, or an arbitrary obscurity, but an illustration of the
extreme implications of an equation that is the bedrock of Joyce's
writing" (5). Yet, it is only in the concluding chapter of this
book that the thesis of the study is articulated most
precisely.

Initially, the author sees Bloom's sexuality as "typical of a
variation of sexual masochism" (5), and, although he finds it
difficult to define "sexual masochism" as a cultural phenomenon, he
looks for models of Bloom's perversity in the brothels, fetish
clubs, and pornographic subcultures of Joyce's time. Bloom's is the
"masochism of the cuckold," a type that relies on sexual
humiliation and shame (6). Some dozen pages are devoted to the
sociological exploration of sexual perversity in relation to
Joyce's work, and Cotter's terms are contextualized thoroughly by
the works of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Sigmund Freud, Michel
Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Leo Bersani, and Jonathan Dollimore, to
name the main "framers" of Cotter's framework. Missing, however, is
a sustained discussion of texts by Joycean theorists of sexuality,
though the works of Frances L. Restuccia, Richard Brown, Joseph
Valente, Sheldon Brivic, Colleen Lamos, and Jean Kimball are
dutifully evoked.1 Over the years, studies by
those and many other Joyceans have offered thorough discussions of
various sexualities and sexual dynamics in Joyce. Cotter's
argument, however, is that masochism as a psychosexual trait
"inverts and overrides Joyce's other sexualities" (20); masochistic
sexuality depends on "the inversion, or subversion, of a
pre-existent sexuality, or of a multiplicity of normative sexual
drives. The study of masochism in Joyce reveals a self that is
spurious, paradoxical, parodic and subversive" (221). Cotter
focuses on such manifestations of sexual masochism in Joyce as
flagellomania (as expounded in Ian Gibson's The English
Vice2), forced feminization, the
sexualization of shame, and the sexualization of alienation, and
readers are offered some excellent, if at times derivative,
readings of masochistic economies he identifies in Joyce's
characters.

In chapter 1, entitled "The Cracked Looking-Glass," the author
explores Joyce's presentation of sexuality through the psychology
of masochism and various theories of its causes, among them the
inversion of repression of sexuality (to sexualize that which was
denied); Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex (and its dismissal
by Cotter and Deleuze); the dynamics of melancholia; and Deleuze
and Guattari's ideas of schizophrenic sexuality.3
Working from both the Freudian concept of sexuality (such as eros
instinct and death instinct) and Deleuze and Guattari's Jungian
belief that "all psychic energy is libidinal" (they write,
"Everywhere you have libido as machine energy"—323), Cotter
declares that "Joyce sets up a number of antithetical pairs in his
work, and draws out the tension between them" (30, 36). Fair
enough, but it is by working from Joyce's texts that Cotter
demonstrates his critical skills as he...

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